Cody Delistraty

LONDON — The writing’s on the wall, we’re told. Whether it was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, the invention of the typewriter 300 years later, or the emoji of today’s smartphones, the act of writing seems to be forever on the precipice of extinction, without quite falling off.

“Writing has never been static,” said Adrian Edwards, a curator at the British Library who put together the exhibition “Writing: Making Your Mark,” which runs through Aug. 27. “The marks we make on the page have always changed and developed in ways in tune with our needs,” he added.

“I think writing’s going to be around for quite some time to come,” Edwards said.

With 120 objects that represent 44 systems of writing from the past 5,000 years, “Writing: Making Your Mark” examines the intriguingly similar past, present and future of writing, showcasing a Mesopotamian tablet that has an early form of cuneiform worked into its clay, an ancient Egyptian monument covered with hieroglyphs and the ink-stained, slightly damaged quill of poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The sheer breadth of the show suggests that writing will most likely never go away, even as new technologies change the definition of what it means to write.

And what does it mean to write, exactly? For one, writing is fundamentally an act of thinking. It would be wrong to define writing exclusively as the act of putting words onto a page, because it is ultimately about the conception and transmission of thought.

Surely, John Milton, who wrote “Paradise Lost” after going blind — he dictated it to his daughters — was still a writer, even though it was not his own quill touching the page. The same goes for Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered from locked-in syndrome, but managed to write “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by blinking when an assistant read out letters from the alphabet.

“In the past, the well-to-do often employed a scribe to do their writing for them,” said Nick Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, “which is not so different from using an AI speech-recognition system.”

Modern forms of writing can be frightening in their speediness and apparent thoughtlessness, but what we find most disturbing about writing’s latest iterations — like someone quickly drafting a message with autocompleted sentences and looped GIF images on their smartphone — is the apparent lack of care involved. A video in the exhibition wonders how we might wish someone “happy birthday” decades into the future. Already, today, many of us simply see a birthday on Facebook and toss out a “like” or WhatsApp a hasty “HBD!”

“The vital signs aren’t good,” said futurist Richard Watson, the author of “Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years” and a lecturer at Imperial College London. “We don’t really write anymore, we just type. We just thumb through a stream of consciousness.” Writing on paper by hand, he said, “is so very different to typing or texting on a screen. It’s slower, deeper, more reflective, more real.”

To be fair, though, even typing comments on Instagram or adding text to Snapchat requires a series of judgments. The difference is that these decisions have limits: There’s a controlled amount of space, and if using emoji, a restricted number of symbols. Alphabets throughout history, from the Phoenician to the Roman, have fluctuated in what they have allowed their speakers to convey. Emoji, in this sense, are nothing new.

“There’s something cyclical going on, isn’t there?” said Edwards, the curator. “You look at the hieroglyphs at the very beginning of the exhibition — the Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs — and then you look at the emojis, and there’s something very similar about them: These are writing systems that you cannot use to express everything.”

Literary writing is easily romanticized, even fetishized, but the written word has more mundane uses, too. A Mesopotamian tablet in the exhibition that is inscribed with a record of how much barley to pay farmhands for their work is a perfect example. Writing is what we make of it.

It can also provide an emotional link to the past. One of the most moving objects in the exhibition is an Egyptian schoolchild’s homework from the second century A.D. done on a wax tablet. An instructor has written out two lines in Greek, which the student has tried and failed to copy below. The student forgot the first letter, then couldn’t finish the sentence because space ran out.

The slow abatement of handwriting today feels like the severing of a historical tie. It relates us to the Mesopotamians, to Chaucer, to that struggling Egyptian student. Finland, for instance, has dropped its handwriting requirements in schools in favor of typing lessons. In the United States, in 2010, Common Core standards excluded cursive requirements in elementary schools, and most states no longer require students to learn it. (In some, however, there are signs of a cursive comeback.)

Will the historical cycle of doubting writing before it proves itself again continue? On the one hand, we should have faith: Writing has resurged time and again. On the other, technology is advancing at a pace like never before. Will the future of written expression become so simple — a smattering of autocompleted sentences, emoji and GIFs — that it will lack any critical thought at all?

“I certainly do not expect writing to go away,” said Bostrom, of Oxford. At least, he added coyly, not within “the finite period of time remaining before machine intelligence makes human intelligence irrelevant.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/arts/design/writing-exhibition-british-library.html" id="0aa90e59-31f1-3bf1-a53e-46051254bb7f">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

From Clay Tablets to Smartphones: 5,000 Years of Writing

This article originally appeared in <a id="0787f6d6-3f64-40fb-9bfa-5f9e1edc8a7c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/arts/design/writing-exhibition-british-library.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook): LONDON — The writing’s on the wall, we’re told. Whether it was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, the invention of the typewriter 300 years later, or the emoji of today’s smartphones, the act of writing seems to be forever on the precipice of extinction, without quite falling off.

From clay tablets to smartphones: 5,000 years of writing

Sports in general, but especially soccer — given its global appeal — are an ideal way for tycoons to purchase prestige and for countries to burnish their reputations, particularly when governments have unsavory associations with issues such as human rights abuse, gender inequality or anti-democratic politics.

“Soccer and the Arab World: The Revolution of the Round Ball,” an exhibition at the Arab World Institute in Paris that runs through July 21, surveys the modern history of the sport in Africa and the Middle East, charting changes in gender and racial politics, government and finance, through the lens of the game.

Viewing the Arab world from the French perspective, the show ranges from midcentury events like the rise of the first Algerian national team, whose players broke away from France even though Algeria was still a colony, to more recent ones, like the purchase in 2011 of the French soccer team, Paris St.-Germain, by a Qatari state-run company.

Binding the show together is an exploration of political clout: using soccer to explore the increasing reach of some Arab nations, while France’s global influence is decreasing — seen in the cultural legitimacy that the sport provides.

“New Arab countries are in the game,” said the show’s curator, Aurélie Clemente-Ruiz, on a recent tour of the exhibition. “It’s not only North Africa or the Middle East but all of these countries from the Arabian Peninsula — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates — that are very involved in soccer, and it’s a way for them to exist in an international point of view. It’s a real soft power and, to them, very useful.”

At the root is the ability of sports to shape perceptions. For the likes of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, being associated with global soccer can help divert attention from the international indignation at the killing of a dissident. For Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates, his ownership and lavish spending on the English team Manchester City automatically buys a certain fame and influence. Similar reasons inform Qatar’s control of Paris St.-Germain and the country’s efforts to win the right to host the men’s World Cup in 2022.

The exhibition begins by looking at how soccer reflected relations between France and Arab nations over nearly a century, including in former French colonies: It touches on the Nejmeh Sporting Club in Lebanon, a team historically known for its players’ mixed ethnicities; and on Larbi Benbarek, a Moroccan midfielder born in Casablanca who played for the French national team and is regarded as the first great Arab soccer player in Europe. (When Morocco won its independence in 1956, Benbarek became the national team’s first coach.)

The show in Paris also focuses on soccer as a way for people on the outskirts of society to gain mainstream recognition: It explores the rise of Arab women’s teams and the shifting views on race in France between the country’s World Cup victories in 1998 and 2018. Clemente-Ruiz said the de facto slogan of the 1998 French national team, “black-blanc-beur,” or “black-white-Arab,” gave way in 2018 to “blue-white-red,” the colors of the French flag. She said the implication was that the French players were no longer defined by skin color but by their shared nationality.

“Soccer is the first place many people will begin to accept immigration, to see those of other colors as one of their own,” Clemente-Ruiz said.

Given the subject matter, at least one of the exhibition’s backers was of interest: Qatar’s tourist board is an official sponsor. So are FIFA and the French Football Federation, which lent a number of archival objects to the exhibition, including both of France’s World Cup trophies. (A private Lebanese collection also provided numerous loans, including the oldest known photographs of Arabs playing soccer, from 1929.)

The show does not kowtow to the sponsors, however. In fact, sometimes it borders on mocking Qatari influence on soccer. In the penultimate room of the exhibition, the uniforms of Paris St.-Germain’s superstars, including Edinson Cavani, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar, are studded with fake jewels, the usual dark blues and blacks of the jerseys transformed into shocks of outlandish rainbow colors. Created by Indian designer Manish Malhotra, known for costume design in Bollywood films, the outfits drip with nouveau-riche taste. Here, soccer is about the confluence of money, prestige, and a polished global image.

Jack Lang, the president of the Arab World Institute and a former culture minister of France, said that he conceived of the exhibition in 2016 as a way to expand the institute’s sometimes-narrow focus on North Africa and its relationship to France. Clemente-Ruiz said she had been committed to maintaining political neutrality, presenting the facts of Arab influence on soccer while withholding any significant judgments.

Yet there are times when the exhibition does take a political side, such as a section on the Palestinian national team that is penned in by high, metal fences, or in a room of eight models of Qatar’s World Cup stadiums, which feature no mention of complaints about working conditions for the thousands of migrant workers who built them.

The show is composed mostly of documents, videos, archival photographs and objects, but there are some artworks, too. One of them, a two-channel video installation, follows Zinedine Zidane, a French former midfielder of Algerian descent, as he plays for Real Madrid in a 2005 match against Villarreal — a study of near-monastic focus and intensity. Splicing together footage from 17 cameras trained on the player, “Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait,” created by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, is a worshipful portrait of one of the most talented French players of all time, ultimately placing an Arab-descended individual at the center of French history and celebrity.

The video brings a spiritual aspect to a sport that is increasingly defined by money and politics. Zidane was a player whose rare talent largely kept him from being used as a political pawn, the child of immigrants who moved to France while Algeria was under colonial rule. After the World Cup win in 1998, Jacques Chirac, then the president of France, called him a man that “the whole country is extremely proud of.”

Zidane’s influence binds past and present, transcending the tensions between the Arab world and France, and epitomizing the possibilities that soccer presents.

— Event info: “Soccer and the Arab World: The Revolution of the Round Ball,”through July 21 at the Arab World Institute in Paris.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ac604fad-3b41-4097-ad7c-311f2bb2157e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/arts/design/arab-world-institute-soccer-exhibition.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook): PARIS — On the pitch, soccer is a cipher for war, with uniforms, formations, victory and defeat. Beyond the pitch, soccer is power, with owners seemingly using their teams as much for the corollary benefits as for any love of the game.

In soccer, power's always in play

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Cody Delistraty

Articles written by the author

From Clay Tablets to Smartphones: 5,000 Years of Writing

From clay tablets to smartphones: 5,000 years of writing

In soccer, power's always in play